The real reason House Democrats are busting out a subpoena against Matthew Whitaker
Donald Trump’s illegitimate Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker has promised to show up and publicly testify before the newly Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee this Friday. The trouble: no one believes you when you’re a scam toilet dunderhead like Matt Whitaker. So he’s getting subpoenaed accordingly, and it’s a bigger deal than merely forcing him to show up.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler released a statement today confirming that he’s arming himself with the Matthew Whitaker subpoena, and that he’s merely keeping it in reserve as insurance in case Whitaker decides not to show up at the last minute, or shows up and refuses to answer questions about his Trump-Russia probe non-recusal in a sufficient manner. The latter might end up being the key to all this.
As the House Democrats start bringing in Donald Trump’s criminal co-conspirators like Matt Whitaker to testify, Trump is inevitably going to tell them to refuse to answer any sticky question and invoke executive privilege instead. Of course executive privilege doesn’t apply to criminal conspiracies, so if someone like Whitaker shows up and tries to invoke it, the subpoena will force them to make an uncomfortable choice: go ahead and testify about Trump’s crimes, or risk getting arrested on the spot for contempt of Congress.
This is the latest reminder that, even though Chairman Jerry Nadler chooses his words carefully and tries to avoid getting ahead of the process, he’s not messing around. Matt Whitaker is walking into a no-win situation on Friday where he can either sell out Trump or go down for protecting Trump, and so all the other Trump henchmen who get hauled in before the cameras will face the same.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report